Just shooting the breeze

This morning I found myself looking at an old picture that I took as a teenager.
It was the silhouette of my friend Iqbal standing at the entrance of a tunnel.

I assume this was a freeway underpass, tunnel, or a storm channel under some road or train line.

We did exactly that sort of thing all the time.

Iqbal, Haroun and I spent our free time exploring the road less traveled. The wild unexplored areas that exist just behind the visible well-traveled one that we all occupy today.

The only other frame of reference I have for this is kids who ran in a gang who would prowl the streets and howl at the moon. (We did that too)

Did we see ourselves as a small gang, doing small gangster stuff or were we just messing around doing what every kid wanted, explore the uncharted world.

Steven king often describes kids doing very similar things walking into abandoned areas and over the railway tracks and that makes me think perhaps all kids need that.

Why then have I never heard of anyone else who spent hours and hours in the graveyard?

It's not as if this was "safe" back in the day. We had our fair share of run-ins with bullies and drunks and thugs.
Yet there we were.

The fact that we went where we could smoke openly might explain some of it but if I think about it we didn't meet any other groups smoking under the railway tracks.

M Parak Dec 2018